


Witness

by xaara



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Ancient Egypt, Biblical Plagues, Book: Exodus, Child Death, Gen, Passover, Religious Colonialism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-18
Updated: 2015-01-18
Packaged: 2018-03-08 03:08:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3193019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaara/pseuds/xaara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel and Uriel attend to their father's work in Egypt, c. 2184 BC.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Witness

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [22by7](http://22by7.livejournal.com/).
> 
> For a full description of the warnings, please see endnotes.

They stood at the east bank, across from Memphis, and watched their father's hand turn the water to blood. The man Aaron stood with his staff raised over the river, a look of wonder as the surface clotted and skinned. It reeked of death, and Castiel turned away, his eyes tracking the banks of the river as they reddened downstream. In the heat of the day, the blood shone black and purple, necrotic as the kingdom they'd come to witness fall.  
  
 _Report,_  Anna whispered to them, a distant song.  
  
"It's as promised," Uriel said. His feet shuffled ungracefully as he turned, the finer points of occupying his vessel still beyond him.  
  
Castiel looked down at his vessel's hand, frustrated at the time it took the eyes to focus and the demands on his energy. "How do they do it?" he asked. Look in only one direction, hear only one voice, die after only a handful of decades. Their lives moved so quickly that they blurred in Castiel's mind, as indistinct as insects.  
  
"We're done here," said Uriel. "We were sent to witness. That's all."  
  
Castiel opened his mouth—a mouth, such a strange device, so impractical and intricate—and stopped before he said anything, Anna's song in his head calling muster.  
  
"Attention," he said, his back straightening of habit. The shadows of his wings bit hard shapes into the sand. Before him, Uriel stiffened, his hands tucked flat at his sides, his shoulders back, his eyes forward. As Castiel waited, the company gathered, staggered wingtip-to-wingtip, ten wide by nine deep.  
  
"Report," he demanded of the platoon leaders, who in turn demanded it of their sections.  
  
The word spread up the chain of command: from here to the sea, from here to the deepest jungle origins, along the winding tributaries and through the cataracts, the river flowed red. Castiel sent a prayer up in the moment between reports, a private prayer, shielded from his company.  _For the life lost_ , he thought.  
  
He turned back to his job.  
  
"We're to report to the garrison," he said. "On my mark. Three. Two. One."  _Mark_  went unspoken as he took flight, shedding the vessel as he went. He returned the skin to its family with a moment of thanks, his attention already elsewhere.

\--

Around him, frogs scrambled over each other like clods of earth. He watched one as its skin caught the sun and it glowed, legs flailing like newborn fingers, strong and directionless.  
  
"Disgusting," said Uriel. When he crushed the frog beneath a sandaled foot, it cracked and squelched, a spurt of gore over the desert.  
  
"Soldier," Castiel said without heat, and Uriel stood close at his side, so close Castiel felt the strange radiance of the vessel over the known of his brother.

\--

The sounds of them. Children's screams. Women and men in helpless tears.  
  
The ground seethed, the lice parting around Castiel like water for a boulder, to rejoin in rippled formation on the other side. In the air, the scent of blood, ripped fresh from bodies too tortured to notice their undone skin.  
  
They stood at the river and watched a woman run at the current. She ran crookedly, her left foot leaving red footprints in the sand, a baby in her arms. She reached the edge and pushed through the reeds, shielding the child from the sharp edges with her arm, scratched bloody already.  
  
At the edge of the reeds, she knelt. The river came up to her chest, floating her tunic around her, clumping the ends of her hair. She kissed the child, then held it underwater for a second, ten, thirty. Castiel thought that the baby might struggle at first, the human instinct for survival alive even in such a primitive brain. It might struggle, and buck, and it would cry for its mother, and its lungs would fill with water, and it would drown.  
  
The mother must think it a kindness.  
  
"They're so breakable," Uriel said. His head canted like a bird's. Perched, ready to take wing. "It takes nearly nothing at all. The tiniest creatures."  
  
The mother knelt, head bowed, sobbing. The river, strong and gentle in all things, floated the child from her and downstream.  
  
Castiel caught the baby past the next clump of high grass, pulled it from the current and lifted it into his arms. It hung inanimate and limp. He turned it over once in his hands, curious, and felt none of the life his father celebrated in these creatures. "So many sacks of mud," Uriel said, but he touched its forehead once in blessing, his finger gentle as he tucked the child's hair behind its ear. "Risen, and returned."

\--

They watched the flies, thick like thunderheads, buzzing like the sound of beads netted over a gourd. They watched the beasts of burden and food die, one by one, lowing still over their fallen kin. They watched the people weep as boils bloomed over their skin, as hail and fire rained in judgment from the skies. They watched locusts like a living blanket pulled close over the topography of fields, of homes, of lives.  
  
They stood in the darkness and watched their father extinguish the sun.  
  
We're a long way away, Castiel thought, and drew nearer to Uriel's glow in the darkness. We're a long way away from home.  
  
"Yes," said Uriel.  
  
Something scuttled in the dirt beside them and Castiel knelt to find a scarab, one leg missing, flailing in the hot sand. He picked it up and felt it cool instantly as it turned lifeless and alabaster. With a sigh, he tossed it behind him and turned back to the city.  
  
"Explain this," Ptah said. Tatenen crouched a pace behind him, sifting the sand through his fingers, his head tilted to the darkened sky. His shoulders tight and angry.  
  
Castiel bowed in deference to the god, who took a step closer and snarled. " _Explain this_."  
  
"We are messengers," Uriel said, "and witnesses only. This is our father's will."  
  
"This," Tatenen said softly from his crouch, "is not your father's land. These are not your father's people. This is not his place."  
  
"He demands simple things," Castiel said.  
  
"These are  _my people_ ," Ptah said. "I dreamed of creation, and called them into being so they might live here and prosper." His voice stirred the wind behind him and caught at the threads of Castiel's grace.  
  
"And those are ours."  
  
"No right. You have no  _right_ ," and he struck, and Castiel felt it as he had never felt, a shock of blindness followed by the rust orange flash of pain. The god struck again, a blow to his midsection, and again across his face. He heard Uriel roar through the ringing, and the beating of wings, and the chiming voices of his brothers. He heard Anna in his head, saying,  _Be still, little brother, be still_ , and blood trickled iron-warm down his throat, and nothing.

\--

As his vessel slept, he waited in the grey.  
  
 _Your diplomacy skills need some work,_  Anna said.  
  
 _I know,_  he said.  
  
 _We are the chosen. We have made our choice_.  
  
 _I know_.  
  
 _We are of the light; they come from the dark._  
  
He frowned at that, but said nothing. He knew the light, and knew the dark also, and neither felt like home.  
  
 _Come back, little brother,_  she said, and he thought Come back where? and obeyed.

\--

The sun had set. Over the desert, it set in glory, and now the wind blew cool and carried the scent of slaughter.  
  
They checked, house to house, for the smear of blood above the door, for those who would find mercy.  
  
Uriel said, "I worried for you, brother," and Castiel said, "We have work to do here."  
  
They walked in silence farther. Ahead, a boy slid out from an unmarked door and crept along the street. His feet left dust prints that feathered and disappeared with the wind. Three houses away, a girl's head appeared at another door, and she held her hand up to shield her hair from the dripping blood as she ducked out to join him. They kissed, giggling, children in the street, her hair wild and deep as the river and his body thin as the reeds.  
  
He whispered something snatched up by the wind and secreted to another place, and she laughed and wrapped her arms around the small of his back and he tangled his fingers in her hair and her tunic and laughed with her.  
  
Uriel turned onto a side street, his mandate to do his work unseen, and Castiel followed. They continued to check, noting the doors, ushers to death. At a corner, Castiel said, "I'll return," and left his brother and retraced his steps to the door that gave forth the boy. The next house smelled of killing and he slipped through it to find the slaughtered lamb and dig his fingers under its split skin.  
  
Outside, he stared up at the boy's clean doorway and thought of the mother's pain at birthing him, thought of her joy. He had never seen his own father's face. He had been a long time far from home, and he looked at this home and saw nothing but sorrow.  
  
It would be easy, to take the drying blood on his fingers, to smear it above the door. It would be easy to disobey, and no one would notice, and the boy and the girl would tiptoe again out to meet one another and stare in wonder at the sky.  
  
He wiped the blood on the cloth his vessel wore, and walked quickly to catch Uriel. The dust clung to his lungs and whipped stinging into his eyes.  
  
Uriel laid a hand on Castiel's shoulder when he returned. The heat of his palm through the cloth, the heat of his purpose. "Thank you," Castiel said.  
  
"We have work to do," said Uriel, and drew back his hand, and peered up at the next door.

\--

Across the river, the city wept for its children.  
  
Castiel felt Uriel behind him and turned his back to the suffering, the darkness. The desert shimmered in the sunlight. A long way away, he thought he saw water, but he blinked and it flickered and disappeared.  
  
"We did our job here," Uriel said.  
  
"I know," said Castiel, and looked into himself to catch a glimpse of home. Farther away now, and dimmer. The light of it fading like candles blown out one by one.  
  
"We're here. We're nowhere but here."  
  
Castiel saw his brother under his vessel, the sliding light too terrible to love. "Yes, we are," he said, and reached out, and touched the skin and nothing beneath.

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: In this story, a mother drowns her baby in order to save it the pain inflicted by the biblical plague of lice. There is also the implied death of a boy who does not have lamb's blood painted over his door. Uriel crushes a frog to death.
> 
> Please let me know if you need more information, and I'll be happy to help.


End file.
